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Natural language-styled comparison engine VERSUS IO is boasting some decent growth today, along with adding new verticals — cameras, camcorders and apps — to its initial offering which targeted buying decisions around smartphones and tablets.

Specifically, the Berlin-based startup says that it’s seen traffic treble in the last four months — 1.5 million uniques in September, up from 520k uniques in June — and that more recently, it’s been further buoyed by the launch of Apple’s iPhone 5, helping the site reach 100k unique visits per day.

Unsurprisingly, VERSUS IO says that Samsung S3 v iPhone 5 is currently its most popular search. May the fanboy (and fangirl) wars continue!

Of the new verticals, the choice to add mobile apps (which should go live in the next day or so — see example) is quite an interesting one. App discovery is a big issue now that the iOS and Android stores are stuffed full of app-filler. Yet, there are plenty of gems out there to be found, sometimes masked by the many seemingly me-too offerings. Being able to hold up one app against another could prove useful, though if I’m honest, it’s not something I’ve been crying out for. Unlike expensive consumer electronics, I don’t tend to spend weeks agonising over which 99 cent app to download, let alone free ones.

In its defence, VERSUS IO says the apps comparisons aren’t actually aimed at consumers, but app developers themselves. The idea is to enable them to compare the features and capability of their apps with competitors in the App Store and Google Play, based on the data provided by VERSUS IO, such as rankings and performance in different regions, genres and applications types. It can cross-reference both app stores, too.

Overall, with the integration of three new verticals, VERSUS IO says that its database now equates to 3 million comparisons.

As we’ve previously noted, VERSUS IO plans to target 640 verticals by summer 2013, which will include: Real Estate, Food, Credit Cards, TVs, Banks, Plastic Surgeons and Motorcycles. In addition, the company has talked up the possibility of applying its technology to people comparison and ranking, based on criteria such as popularity, friends, networks, CVs, and college degrees, which could be kinda fun.

VERSUS IO is funded by Hightech-Gruenderfonds and JMES Investments to the tune of €700k.

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Crunchbase

OverviewVersus offer over 45 million natural language text comparisons ranging from smartphones to universities in 18 languages. With such a huge amount of valuable data at hand, Versus aim to be the go-to wikipedia-scale information source for comparisons. Since their launch in 2011, traffic has increased on average by 35% each month and is now attracting 3 million unique monthly visitors. Versus raised …